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Community Development Television


Those who do not know public access television might take a look at Manhattan Neighborhood Network’s line-up of shows -- with names like Rappin With Rockstars, Outside My Window, Mark After Dark -- and conjure up images of a real-life Wayne’s World.

But then they do not know the story of the three women from the Lower East Side who, after taking a workshop at the Lower East Side Worker’s Center of the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops , each created her own separate first-person documentary about her health problems in the wake of September 11th.

The documentaries were first shown on one of MNN’s public access TV channels. Then they were projected onto the wall of a neighborhood church during a community organizing event. These screenings helped spur a neighborhood campaign that prompted Bellevue Hospital to provide better medical service to people suffering post 9/11 health effects, regardless of income.

MNN, which arguably runs the most prominent of the 3,000 public access television channels in the country, boasts 560 hours of local programming per week, including programs used by youth, immigrants, women and people of color to maintain an electronic dialogue with people living in Manhattan. MNN also provides grants to 25 neighborhood-based groups so that they can create video content that furthers community development agendas.

Esperanza del Barrio used one of these grants to document police harassment of street vendors. The Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, the organization I now work for, discussed how homeowners can avoid deed-theft scams on a talk show it produces on MNN.

But the opportunity for community development on public access television may change if pending federal legislation is passed –- because there may no longer be any public access television as we know it.

Shifting Regulatory Ground

Current federal law requires cable companies in New York City to provide service to all areas of the city as part of the price they pay to be given permission for ripping up streets and using city resources to lay their cable. Under “franchise” agreements that cable companies entered into with the city, cable companies must also provide television channels for public, educational and government (known as PEG) programming as well as provide these non-profit institutions with television production capacity. As a result, every borough in New York has public access television channels, facilities, equipment and operations that are paid for by the cable companies.

But this may change. In an effort to compete with companies like Time-Warner, RCN and Cablevision who provide cable services throughout the New York area, telecommunication behemoths like Verizon and SBC are looking to provide video services themselves. And to do this, they are lobbying for various laws that would make it easier for them to compete. Several of them are wending their way through Congress now.

''My bill seeks to keep limitations and regulations to a minimum in order to encourage an active, growing marketplace rather than the atrophied one we have right now,'' Marsha Blackburn, Republican Congressman of Tennessee, explained to Felicia Lee in an article about the various legislative proposals in the New York Times earlier this month. Lee added: “Advocates of the legislation say that the fears of the demise of public access are exaggerated and that some local control of franchises is written into the bills.”

But the supporters of public access are skeptical. “The introduction of broadband technology is a good thing,” said Lyell Davies, one of the 40 staff members at Manhattan Neighborhood Network. “But there’s no reason why it can’t be introduced with the same franchise requirements.”

If some of this legislation is passed, there may no longer be the conditions that ensure universal cable service, and enable neighborhood-based voices to make an impact through their use of public access.

Instead of having to report to City Hall, companies would conceivably report to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) where there would almost certainly be less local oversight and less capacity to respond to consumer complaints.

Instead of providing service to all corners of the city, new high quality Internet, television and phone services could conceivably land in Murray Hill and the Upper East Side while circumventing Red Hook, Hunts Point, Washington Heights or anywhere else that is perceived as offering less profit potential.

And instead of having the option to tune into one of your neighbors providing information on a matter of immediate relevance to your surrounding area, you could be restricted to a strict diet of non-local, corporate-run television.

Shred To BITS?

The fact is, no one is exactly sure what direction the telecommunications legislation will go. Right now there are several competing proposals. The one that advocates are focusing their attention on is referred to as Broadband Internet Transmission Service (BITS) II and still being debated in a congressional subcommittee. Public access advocates are concerned that it entails federal, not city, oversight over franchise enforcement; places a ceiling on the number of public access channels that would be provided; dramatically lowers the amount that companies would set aside for public access operations and gives companies considerable latitude in determining what neighborhoods they may – or may not – serve.

If Verizon and SBC are given a lower bar to clear when using city infrastructure to expand their services, it would certainly prompt cable companies to demand, in the name of fair competition, that their bar be lowered as well.

But beyond the worlds of television and Internet services, the stakes are high because cable company franchises are unique and have far reaching implications for how municipalities do business with companies that use public resources. Franchise agreements speak directly to what role these companies should play in community development. Rick Junger, the director of community media for Manhattan Neighborhood Network, agrees: “The cable franchise model is one of the only one of its kind that builds in public interest and support for the surrounding community.”

Mark Winston Griffith, the co-director of the Neigbhorhood Economic Development Project (NEDAP) and a fellow at the Drum Major Institute, has been in charge of the community development topic page since its inception in 2003.  

Housing Advocacy Wins Election, With One Exception


Whichever candidate they supported for mayor, many housing advocates counted the latest election a victory, even before Election Day – thanks to a range of housing-friendly commitments.

“Overall, it’s been probably the most significant year for housing policy advancements in the last 20 years,” said David Greenberg of the Association for Neighborhood Housing and Development. “The promises made during the campaign were really exceptional.”

Some say there was one serious exception.

From 65,000 To 165,000 New Housing Units

In his re-election campaign against an opponent who made affordable housing one of his signature issues, Mayor Michael Bloomberg promised a commitment to expand the construction of affordable housing. What began as a $3 billion plan to build and preserve 65,000 units grew to a new $7.6 billion plan to build and preserve 165,000 units. Many advocates consider this the biggest victory.

But there were others. Bloomberg has also committed to preserving some existing affordable housing that is at significant risk of becoming unaffordable, like Mitchell-Lama apartments. Very recently, after advocates rallied to focus attention on the potential loss of thousands of Section 8 apartments, the city announced that it would develop a “comprehensive assisted-housing preservation strategy” within 90 days.

During the campaign, Bloomberg made a number of decisions that pleased housing advocates. The first sign of the mayor’s new interest in housing came in April when he agreed with City Comptroller William Thompson to use $130 million in Battery Park City funds to develop a trust fund for low-cost housing, a commitment advocates had been seeking for years.

Every Week A New Initiative

In October, it seemed a week did not pass without some new initiative on housing:
• A collaboration with national charities and financial institutions to build and preserve affordable housing
• A new initiative to combat predatory lending practices
• A plan to search exhaustively across the city for underutilized land on which to build, and A plan to build affordable housing for middle income New Yorkers.

To top it off, the day before Election Day, Bloomberg announced New York/New York 3, a state and city collaboration to build 9,000 more units of supportive housing. It was widely expected but obviously timed to swing any wavering voters who somehow missed or ignored Bloomberg’s ubiquitous advertisements.

One Serious Exception – Keeping Rent-Regulated Apartments

But Bloomberg’s commitments largely avoided a significant problem in housing that he has been virtually silent about; indeed, some advocates charge he is moving backwards. The problem is the preservation of rent regulated apartments.

Some in the mayor’s administration might not understand the extent of the problem, said Michael McKee of Tenants and Neighbors, a statewide coalition. McKee said he was stunned when he read in a recent newspaper article that the city housing commissioner said that the city had had a net increase in affordable housing in recent years.

“That’s totally absurd,” McKee said. “We’ve lost 200,000 rent regulated apartments in the last 10 years. We’ve lost 11,000 Section 8 apartments and we’ve already lost 40,000 Mitchell-Lama rentals.”

The city did not respond to a request for comment.

The mayor’s lack of action on preserving rent regulated apartments, which account for roughly a third of all rental apartments in the city, is “deadly,” McKee said: “It will be absolutely deadly and we will all pay for the failure of Mike Bloomberg to do something about this.”

Jenny Laurie, executive director of Met Council on Housing, agreed.

The loss of rent regulated apartments has been fueled by a change in the rent regulation laws in 1997 that allowed landlords to decontrol apartments when those apartments reach $2,000 monthly rents as they are vacated. They can also decontrol those apartments if the household income is $175,000 or greater for two years and the rent reaches $2,000.

Getting a rent stabilized apartment’s rent up to $2,000 seemed unlikely, perhaps, in 1997. But over his first term, Bloomberg’s appointees to the Rent Guidelines Board have allowed rents to increase significantly as landlords claimed operating costs had skyrocketed.

“You’re going to see the steady erosion through the vacancy decontrol provisions and if we continue to have high guidelines, you’re going to see steady erosion of tens of thousands of affordable housing units a year,” Laurie said.

Bloomberg’s main emphasis has been on building new affordable apartments, which is just one part of addressing the affordability problem. Saving what already exists is the other part.

“He’s putting drops of water in the top of the bucket while there’s a big hole in the bottom of the bucket,” Laurie said.

Advocates were hopeful once that Bloomberg was committed to addressing the loss of rent regulated apartment. In his first term, he supported repeal of the Urstadt Law, as I’ve written about before.

Simply put, the Urstadt Law prevents the city from passing any law stricter than the state housing laws. That effectively ties the city’s hands on enacting legislation to address rent regulated apartments. Bloomberg flipped on his commitment to repeal the Urstadt Law during his reelection campaign.

Hope Elsewhere

There may be some reason for optimism, however, on two other fronts – the New York City Council and the New York State Legislature. In contested elections for City Council, pro-tenant candidates won in races across the city. Advocates are working now to ensure that the next City Council speaker is pro-tenant, too. At the state level, anti-tenant Republicans lost seats.

“Whether we change Bloomberg’s mind on home rule, it may be that in 2006 or 2008 the state government will be controlled by Democrats and the state will return to localities the right to legislate over rent regulations,” Laurie said.

McKee said he was “very skeptical” about Bloomberg’s many promises during the campaign.

“I’ve been through this too many times,” he said. “I think it’s commendable that the Bloomberg administration has undertaken efforts to create new housing. I think it would be more commendable if they also expended some political capital and got involved in the fight to preserve the affordable housing we have.”

Joe Lamport is the assistant director of the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court, a coalition of community housing organizations.  

Atlantic Yards: Through The Looking Glass


The Atlantic Yards story in Brooklyn is becoming a bit like the tale of Alice in Wonderland. In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, everything appears backwards, Alice is caught up in a giant chess game of powerful players over which she has no control, and the characters she meets talk nonsense.

The planning for Atlantic Yards is all backwards. Normally, government does a plan for the area, then looks at the potential environmental impacts of the plan, decides what to do, and then either does it or puts it out to private developers to bid on. In Atlantic Yards -- and increasingly in other megaprojects throughout the city -- it is just the reverse. First a private developer does a plan for the area, gets government officials to back it, then does an environmental impact statement, and in the process of looking at the environmental impacts all of the big planning issues that were never addressed in the first place come up for discussion. But the people who live and work in the area and will be most affected by the plan have the least to say about it.

The Atlantic Yards project was born two years ago when Forest City Ratner, one of the nation’s largest developers with a virtual monopoly on downtown expansion, proposed what now appears to be the largest-ever project in the borough. The latest version of its project includes a professional basketball arena, 7,300 units of housing, and over 600,000 square feet of office space. The developer then got Governor George Pataki, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz to voice full public support for the proposal. Then the governor unleashed the State of New York’s Empire State Development Corporation, which he controls, to place at the developer’s disposition the government’s powers of eminent domain so that privately-owned land on the site could be assembled.

With the Empire State Development Corporation at the head of the pack, Forest City Ratner could also avoid going through the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Process (nicknamed, ULURP), which would force it to face votes by the local community boards, borough president, City Planning Commission, and City Council. The developer needed to get the right to build over the rail yards owned by the Metropolitan Transit Authority, but since this is a state-run agency controlled by the governor, a hastily-planned Request for Proposals was put together so the developer could be guaranteed the rail yards. And $200 million in public subsidies were thrown in to sweeten the deal.

Finally, two years after the project was proposed, the Empire State Development Corporation decided it would start the legally-required environmental impact study. Earlier this year this corporation issued a draft scope of work that outlined all the things they proposed to study, including potential impacts on traffic, air quality, open space, and neighborhood character, including the effects on the economic and social livelihood of the surrounding Brooklyn communities. Comments on this scope of work were due to the corporation in late October, and the agency is expected to issue what’s called a draft environmental impact statement in the early part of next year.

On October 18, over 800 people packed an auditorium in downtown Brooklyn to tell the Empire State Development Corporation about all the potential impacts that the developer’s plan could have -- many more than the agency had proposed to study. This hearing was a crucial turning point for two reasons. First, it tarnished the image of inevitability and consensus that the developer had cultivated around the project. It was clear even to the press that had treated Forest City Ratner with kindness that there were large sections of the community that had serious doubts about the scale, design, and cost of the project. Secondly, it pointed out the need for careful, detailed planning for development of the Atlantic Yards site so that it would knit that development into the fabric of Fort Greene, Prospect Heights, Park Slope, Clinton Hill and other neighborhoods. Ratner’s Metrotech and Atlantic Terminal developments had already shown that the company, which invaded Brooklyn from Ohio, likes to do suburban-style malls. There was reference at the hearing to the Unity Plan, developed over a 15-month period through a series of community workshops, and the Extell Plan, rejected by the MTA without a hearing.

So now we’re back to planning, which should have been the starting point. The three community boards affected by the project and community-based organizations under the umbrella of the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods , among many others, seem to be raising all the fundamental questions that should go into the planning process but that were avoided during two years of cheerleading. There seems to be a fair amount of sentiment for developing something over the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s rail yards, including affordable housing, but only a thorough planning process can produce consensus over what it should be. Community benefit agreements put together by the developer and several local groups might be useful if they too were part of a broader community planning process.

Is Environmental Review Backwards?

In this looking glass world, the environmental review process has been spun around and is now backwards. The laws establishing environmental review procedures by the city and state were designed to provide decision makers – the governor, mayor and borough president, for example – with information about potential impacts of new projects so that they could make informed decisions. Government could then determine what measures would have to be taken to mitigate the impacts before they approved or disapproved the project. But with Atlantic Yards, government leaders have already made up their minds, and given away the store. The environmental impact statement could very well end up as a useless exercise that satisfies no one except the project sponsors. Or it may turn out like the nonsensical poem, Jabberwocky, that Alice discovered in the Looking Glass World, filled with unintelligible jargon. Its multiple volumes will be more than your average community resident or business person can digest in the course of a normal lifetime. If past practice is any indicator, they will barely have enough time to get past the introduction before the state agency moves to put the final rubber stamp on the project.

The most troubling part of the Atlantic Yards project is that it seems to be part of a much bigger reversal in the public process set up to handle development proposals. The same thing happened with the Jets Stadium on the West Side of Manhattan, the rebuilding of lower Manhattan, and the Brooklyn Bridge Park. State authorities under the governor’s control make deals with private developers, then use their powers to override local land use procedures. And compliant local politicians pave the way, undermining the few regulatory tools they have at their disposal to empower their own constituents in the planning process. And while these mega- developers go through the back door and benefit from the magic mirrors, the thousands of neighborhood developers that are the backbone of local improvement have to follow the rules and go through ULURP.

New Yorkers from the boroughs outside Brooklyn who think Atlantic Yards has nothing to do with them should think twice. Atlantic Yards could be the place where the mirror gets shattered, the King is captured, and Tweedledee and Tweedledum have to walk away in shame.

Tom Angotti is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, City University of NY, editor of Progressive Planning Magazine, and a member of the Task Force on Community-based Planning. 



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